Thursday, March 29, 2012

Let's talk about this, shall we? Sixty-five isn't a fun age to finally retire. Me? I've got a haul yet to get there, but looking at my parents generation, born in the 1940s, sitting in their 60s, they've got arthritis, heart conditions, bowel conditions, some are cancer survivors, partner survivors, and heaven forbid even children survivors. We talk about average lifespans stretching to 80 or so, but that's only 15 years from 65, and 13 from 67. And it is only an average. Dying in your 60s is still very common. These too are the years of the expanding medicine cabinet and the onset of senility, osteoporosis, cataracts, and prostate problems.

My mother is close to 65, and my father nearer 70. My mother is exhausted after a lifetime of work that began, unpaid, before she was a teenager. She is soon set to retire on her limited savings. She does contract work but ageism and age make it very difficult to find steady and well-paying work. She cares for her institutionalised senile mother and this is a permanent on-call job. My father can't work anymore and suffers more health problems than I care to think about most days. They both rely on CPP and OAP because their savings are not great, despite decades of virtually non-stop employment. Their children are capable and educated, but they, we, are born in an age when two incomes are necessary to in order maintain the standard of living that one would provide in their generation. In five, 10, or 15 years, it'll be three incomes or more.

It would literally kill them to work to 67. The end of their days would be spent trying to feed themselves as they watched their bodies and minds give out beneath them. They are lucky to be at this age now, before Flaherty's increase kicks in. But others won't be. Many of the the generation following theirs, in their late 40s and 50s now, will have work until they die.

This is what the smarmy little bucket of fuck Jim Flaherty is asking telling them to do. Either that, or be lucky enough to strike it rich and live in a fortress.

Privatise healthcare, and life-expectancy will crawl back and millions won't have to worry about living past 67 anyway.

Why? Does it even matter? Boils down to some sick myope-misanthropic dream about fighter planes, religion maybe, and some neofeudal social Darwinism, and other viagraic rightwing landfill.

My 30-something generation and those following? We didn't sign-up for this shit.

But we're lucky. My cohort that is. Because Jim should've stuck in his pension jump a few years earlier and killed them all off. The retiring and retired generation now are not all angry white Conservative-voting shitheads. It's the kids who are in the streets and jail cells in Toronto and Montreal, but it's the greyhairs with broadband who are The Eight Hundred: the bloggers, the letter-to-the-editor writers, the finger-waggers and emeritus profs, environmentalists, career civil servants, veterans, and labour leaders. They're the ones spear-heading the charge and tearing the living guts out of the skullduggery of the last election.

They're the ones who could very well be the reason Jim finds himself trampled as the rest of his encephalitic rat colony beat for the exits in the blinding torchlight.

7 comments:

Thanks for that Boris, It sums up my feeling very well and I am one of those 'older finger wagging bloggers' who rely's upon the OAS has 'retired', and does not want to, work after 60 but got out to leave some room for the youth to find a job.Well said!

That sums up my feelings exactly. I'm approaching 67 and still have to work parttime as I lost my RRSP in the last recession (early 90's) due to the bankruptcy of the Trust company which held it. It is not easy to keep working past 65 and I feel for those who will be caught in that trap if SHit and his troll are not booted out of office.

Just wait until people start dying from food safey issues and see how they dismiss those who complain as foreign sponsored radicals or some variation on the theme. The troll should remember that lack of oversight caused Walkerton. Apparently they expect consumers to complain to the companies if things go wrong. That should work out really well.

My partner just made the grandfathering clause but given self-employment being a constant feast or famine, we'll both be working until they pull us out of the office on a gurney.

The way Harper is steering us into an economic iceberg, we will definitely see a decline in the life expectancy rate. The frail, tired 60+ worker or the impoverished unemployed pensioner might very well be put out of their misery by a can of tainted salmon.